Tuesday, October 3. 2017

In 1226 St. Francis of Assisi, founder of the Franciscan order, died; he was canonized in 1228. In 1863 President Lincoln declared the last Thursday in November Thanksgiving Day. In 1913 President Wilson signed into law the United States Revenue Act of 1913, a portion of which reinstituted the federal income tax. In 1929 the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes formally changed its name to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. In 1941 Adolf Hitler declared in a speech in Berlin that Russia had been "broken" and would "never rise again." In 1942 President Roosevelt established the Office of Economic Stabilization. In 1944 US troops cracked the Siegfried Line north of Aachen, Germany. In 1951 the New York Giants captured the National League pennant in game three by a score of 5-4 as third baseman Bobby Thomson hit a three-run homer off the Brooklyn Dodgers' Ralph Branca in the "shot heard 'round the world." In 1962 astronaut Wally Schirra blasted off from Cape Canaveral aboard the Sigma 7 on a nine-hour flight. In 1981 Irish nationalists at the Maze Prison near Belfast, Northern Ireland, ended seven months of hunger strikes that had claimed 10 lives. In 1990 West Germany and East Germany ended 45 years of postwar division, declaring the creation of a new unified country.